One clue: The West Virginia Democrat voted with the Trump administration 50 percent of the time.
One clue: The West Virginia Democrat voted with the Trump administration 50 percent of the time.
J oe Manchin may be the second-most powerful person in Washington, D.C., right now. He is the 50th senator whose vote Democrats must secure in order to have Vice President Kamala Harris break a tie and pass legislation. “Manchin controls everything,” a senior Democratic Senate aide told Politico’s Playbook today.
Democrats are clearly counting on him to push President Biden’s $1.9 trillion COVID stimulus package to victory. Bernie Sanders, the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, told ABC News on Sunday that Democrats have the votes to pass another COVID-19 relief package:
“Yes, I believe that we do because it’s hard for me to imagine any Democrat, no matter what state he or she may come from, who doesn’t understand the need to go forward right now in an aggressive way to protect the working families of this country.”
Hold on, Bernie. Joe Manchin of West Virginia may have a different political calculus than other Democrats you know.
Vice President Harris gave an inartful interview to a West Virginia television station in which she made it clear she expected Manchin to join Democrats in passing the $1.9 trillion COVID bill without Republican help. She also gave a condescending answer to concerns about the job prospects that out-of-work West Virginia miners face and appeared ignorant by referring to “abandoned land mines.”
Manchin wasn’t happy and let the White House know it. He told reporters: “I saw [the interview], I couldn’t believe it. No one called me [about it]. We’re going to try to find a bipartisan pathway forward, but we need to work together. That’s not a way of working together.”
Manchin believes that the price tag of the COVID bill is too high. He points out that the more than $4 trillion in relief passed in the past ten months exceeds the annual budget of the federal government. He also thinks that stimulus checks shouldn’t be going to people making more than $300,000 a year. If Manchin doesn’t get what he wants, he can refuse to back the bill unless President Biden sits down and negotiates with Republicans. As Manchin has said, “if you’re wanting to do policy, it should be bipartisan.”
Democrats tell me that they’re not that worried about Manchin. “He has never been the critical vote to give Republicans the victory on any major legislation,” one Democratic consultant told me. “He has talked a GOP game but plays ball with us.”
But the political landscape Manchin gazes upon has changed. Joe Biden won only 30 percent of the vote in West Virginia, and Manchin is the only Democrat elected statewide. In 2018, a strong Democratic year, he won with only 50 percent of the vote.
When Manchin is next up for reelection, in 2024, he will be 77 years old. He might retire, but if he doesn’t, he must firmly demonstrate his independence, or he will be an underdog after four years of the Biden administration’s war on fossil fuels. And Manchin supported many Trump positions — he voted with the Trump administration 50 percent of the time over its four years.
Manchin has privately told friends that he is frustrated in the Senate and misses the days when he was governor of West Virginia, from 2005 to 2010. One of the main reasons Manchin ran for a Senate seat in 2010 is that he would have been able to serve only two more years as governor because of term limits. But in 2024, the governor’s chair will again be vacant, and Manchin could run again to fill it.
The bottom line is that Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has fewer strings to pull with Joe Manchin than he would have had in the past.
In addition to the new political calculus he faces, Joe Manchin is also at bottom a different kind of Democrat when it comes to spending.
“I don’t ever remember FDR recommending sending a damn penny to a human being. We gave ’em a job and gave ’em a paycheck,” he recently told the Washington Post. “Yeah, Jesus criminy, can’t we start some infrastructure program to help people, get ’em back on their feet? Do we have to keep sending checks out?”